A Little Health

A little health,
A little wealth,
A little house and freedom,
And at the end
A little friend
And little cause to need him.

It's the birthday of Jay
McInerney, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1955). His first novel, Bright
Lights, Big City (1984) achieved phenomenal success.

It's the birthday of Edmund
White, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1940). He worked as an editor at Horizon
and The Saturday Review, and wrote A Boy's Own Story (1982).

It's the birthday of Carolyn
Heilbrun, born in East Orange, New Jersey (1926). She's written a number
of books of literary criticism, and-under the pseudonym Amanda Cross-fourteen
murder mysteries starring the detective Kate Fansler, including Honest Doubt
(2000), and The Edge of Doom (2002). She started teaching English at
Columbia University in 1960, but she worried that the university wouldn't give
her tenure, and she felt she had better have something else to fall back on.
She made the hero of her books a rich, thin English professor who spent as much
time talking about university politics as she did running down criminals.

It's the birthday of A. B. Guthrie, [Alfred Bertram Guthrie],
born in Bedford, Indiana (1901). He wrote The Big Sky (1946), and won
a Pulitzer Prize for The Way West. He said, "Fiction is love and
hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musing of have-beens
and might-have-beens."

It's the birthday of Horatio
Alger, Jr., born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1832). His career as a minister
ended when he was accused of molesting two boys in his parish. He left New England,
vowed to redeem himself by helping the poor, and set about writing novels about
the homeless children who lived in the streets of New York City. His first novel,
Ragged Dick; or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, was serialized
in a magazine, where it picked up more readers with every issue. When it was
published in book form in 1867, it became an instant bestseller. Groucho Marx
once said, "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and
many of my young friends-that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance
would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old
man I think of it as the story of my life."

On this day in 1864, the songwriter Stephen
Foster died in New York City. He was thirty-seven years old. His wife
had left him, and he was slowly drinking himself to death. Sick in bed with
a high fever, he got up to call the chambermaid, fell against the washstand
and cut his neck. He lay there for hours before someone could take him to the
hospital, and he died a couple of days later. When his wife went through his
belongings after his death, she found thirty-eight cents and a scrap of paper
in his handwriting that read, "Dear friends and gentle hearts "

It is also the anniversary of the death of James
Joyce, in Zurich in 1941. He died of a stomach ulcer. He wrote Dubliners
(1914), A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses
(1922), his masterpiece. His last book was Finnegans Wake, which remained
a work in progress for 16 years until it was finally published in 1939. The
novel was about the family of a publican named Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
in Chapelizod (near Dublin). The message of the book is supposed to be that
history is cyclic, and to show this, the first sentence of the book is the end
of the unfinished last sentence. The last sentence in the novel is "A way
a lone a last a loved along the," to be continued by the first sentence,
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings
us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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